Tourist dies at India's Taj Mahal 'while taking a selfie'

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Sixty six-year-old Hideto Ueda was said to have been taking a 'selfie' at the Taj Mahal’s Royal Gate, Sagar Singh, a local witness told the BBC.

Mr Ueda was accompanied by three other people and a local guide when he collapsed after climbing up the stairs of the white marble tomb and fell, Sushant Gaur, an officer at the local police station in Agra, told the AFP.

“He was rushed in an ambulance to the hospital but he could not be revived.

"A post mortem was carried out and the cause of death is heart attack. We have duly informed the Japanese embassy about the unfortunate incident " Susant Gaur told the AFP.

A train in Andhra Pradesh, India Photo: Fotolia/AP

One of Mr Ueda’s colleagues was said to have suffered a fractured leg after they both fell from the staircase, the police said.

Dozens of grisly selfie-related deaths and injuries this year so far has led Russia’s interior ministry to warn selfie-takers about the danger of, among other things, posing with a lion. Two men in the Ural Mountains died in June after they posed while pulling the pin from a hand grenade, while in May a woman survived after shooting herself in the head in her Moscow office. A month later a 21-year-old university graduate plunged 40 feet to her death while posing hanging from a Moscow bridge.

A man taking a selfie picture in Moscow Photo: Fotolia/AP

This June, the European Union proposed a law to criminalise social media posts containing pictures of landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris or Rome’s Trevi Fountain.